berkeley

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Google closes the book on Reader, announces July 1 sunset.

- Petitions beg Google to reconsider closure of Reader.

- Google Reader alternatives including Flipboard, Feedly, and more.

- Google to retire more services in new round of spring cleaning.

- Google yanks ad-blocker apps from Google Play.

- Samsung Galaxy S4 event: Join us at 3p.m. PT today (live blog).

- Berkeley creates the first graphene earphones, and (unsurprisingly) they're awesome.

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One of my favorite things about watching old movies is hearing how people might have spoken in eras past -- the expressions they used, their old-school smack talk. But what did the languages from thousands of years back sound like? Hollywood, as far as I know, has yet to make a movie in which characters talk in authentic proto-Austronesian.

The language nerd in me, was, therefore, excited to discover that scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program to rapidly reconstruct vocabularies of ancient languages using only their modern language descendants. … Read more

There's a "Battle of the Bay" going on tonight at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, and it's happening in a haze of Chinese food, juggling, music, and coding. And maybe some unicycling, if you're lucky.

The social network holds its second Stanford versus Cal (University of California at Berkeley) hackathon for budding coders to try their hands at creating new products. Nearly 200 students from both campuses sat in front of their laptops at around 5 p.m. with no intention of stopping until 3 p.m. tomorrow. That's what Facebook hackathons are … Read more

Tired of the same old battery life drain game? A team of engineers from UC Berkeley's Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory has developed an app called Carat that "provides a great deal of information about how energy is being used on your phone," according to the official description.

So how does Carat work? The app runs in the background and monitors the energy consumption of various apps and processes on your smartphone, then sends that information to a data analytics Spark application running on Amazon Web Services. Usual suspects include data-hungry apps, an outdated operating system, Wi-Fi, and GPS. … Read more

Scientists are genetically engineering viruses in the pursuit of better battery life, perhaps leading to smartphones charged from the motion of walking.

The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory yesterday described a microelectronic device that uses a benign virus to build up electric charge from movement.

Its first prototype was able to display the No. 1 on an LCD display when a person pressed a postage-stamp size button.

That amount of current isn't useful enough to charge common electronics, such as a music player or phone. But the researchers' novel approach to harvesting energy from motion shows … Read more

Where do you find inspiration for your work? Robert Full, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, and his team looked to lizards when it came to thinking of ways to better design robots for search and rescue missions.

Such robots have to be more agile. So Full's team studied the movements of a red-headed Agama lizard and discovered the importance of having a tail.

"I think what this shows is that even the strangest creature that we think has nothing to offer really holds fundamental secrets of how things work, and those can be translated to … Read more

What if tobacco could grow fuel in its leaves?

As far-fetched as that sounds, a group of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is testing the limits of genetic engineering to make the widely grown tobacco plant a carrier for hydrocarbons.

Scientists will be at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit this week to discuss the project, which received a $4.8 million grant over three years. The grant fits ARPA-E's mission of funding research that is high-risk but with a potential for a breakthrough.

Biofuels or biochemicals are typically made by growing plants and then converting that biomass into … Read more

What is it about lizards and tech? First, they're kicking butt in video games and now, they're influencing robot design.

Leaping lizards and geckos are the inspiration behind a new robot out of the University of California at Berkeley that could lead to more agile search-and-rescue droids in disaster situations.

Led by Robert Full, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, a group of graduate and undergraduate biology and engineering students found that by adding a "tail" to a remote control car and adjusting the tail's angle, they could correct and stabilize the car's position as it was flying through the air.

The team discovered this by watching how red-headed African Agama lizards used their tails to maneuver themselves while leaping.

In their experiment, the students coaxed the lizards to jump off a ramp onto another platform. However, they deliberately mixed up the surface of the ramp to include slicker turf, resulting in the lizards losing their footing as they launched themselves off the ramp. During those times, the Agama lizards were able to regain their balance and land safely on the other side by swinging their tail upward. … Read more

Here's some bone-chilling news: The chance of breaking a bone increases significantly after age 50, especially for women. We know bones lose mass as they age. However, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says what makes them become brittle is more complicated than that.

Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist at the lab, is trying to figure out why bones break so easily in older adults. While a lot of work has been done looking at the loss of quantity of bone, Ritchie and his team are focusing on another issue: quality. Specifically, how bones deteriorate. SmartPlanet interviewed Ritchie … Read more